


The Frivolous Fable of a Spinster's Suspicions

by Nineveh_uk



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:25:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nineveh_uk/pseuds/Nineveh_uk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Miss Climpson consults Lord Peter on the Cattery's latest case.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Frivolous Fable of a Spinster's Suspicions

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Taelle

 

 

'May I enquire,' Lord Peter, said Miss Climpson, proffering his refurbished tea-cup, `as to your opinions of White Slavery?' 

Lord Peter Wimsey took the cup, uncrossed his ankles, revealing a glimpse of plum-coloured socks, and re-crossed them in the opposite direction. 

`On the whole,' he said, `I am inclined to discount it. The press are keen, of course. It gives them an excuse to print photographs of young women in various states of undress on the pretext of warning the innocent young maidens of Wimbledon against highly unlikely crime, and subsequently to take the credit when nothing happens to them.' He tapped a biscuit thoughtfully against his saucer. `No doubt in the course of history there have been one or two young women who have inadvertently found themselves decorating the spangled carpets of dubious gentlemen in Tangiers, but when the typist vanishes leaving nothing behind her but a cloud of Eugenie talc and Kraska, I am more inclined to suspect she has weighed the charms of office life against t'other dear charmer her young man, and found them wanting.'

`I tend to agree with you, Lord Peter. When one comes across so _many_ young women who have been ruined, as my good father would have put it, in the most _mundane_ of circumstances in quite _ordinary_ places, it seems more than frivolous - it is almost _immoral_ \- for there to be so much interest expended on things that I am sure almost never happen. And yet,' she sighed, `this advertisement has appeared in the _Daily Yell_ for times in the past five months, and I cannot feel _quite_ satisfied that there is nothing in it.'

`It is said that our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery, but it is positively frigid to that close at hand.'

Lord Peter put down the cup and saucer and held out his hand for the square of newsprint, which Miss Climpson handed over with a jangling of bracelets.

LADY COMPANION SOUGHT by widow in good circumstances to provide companionship and secretarial assistance. Nursing training preferred. Foreign travel and refined society assured.

Wimsey mused over crossed arms. `I see what you mean. No agency, PO Box at goodish address, and the lure of the Blue Train, assumin' that the good woman isn't losing the help to the Kenyan lions. What with the excessive repletion, it sets the mind a-wanderin'. '

`I am glad you think so, Lord Peter. I confess I was becoming a _little_ concerned, and hoping it wasn't merely my imagination. I never had a great deal of that kind of imagination as a girl, and I fear that to acquire it now at my time of life it would be most _inconvenient_.'

`Perish the thought.'

`Yes,' said Miss Climpson decisively, lifting the receiver from the telephone on her desk. `I think it would prove really quite worthwhile to make a _small_ investigation. As the Post Office given is in Richmond, it would cost very little to look into it initially, and I feel sure that Mrs Tainhurst would be _ideal_ for the task. I don't think you've met her,' she added, summoning that young woman from the floor above, before continuing, `she came to us only four months ago, and I am sure she would take it as a great compliment to be sent on such a _mission_. She has,' Miss Climpson added, `I feel sure, a sense of _adventure_ , and besides, she speaks excellent French.'

Mrs Tainhurst proved to be a big, bonny woman of about thirty who looked as if she played a good deal of tennis, as indeed she did. Miss Climpson did not add that she had come to the attention of the Cattery having divorced her husband for cruelty whereupon that man had promptly re-arranged his business affairs so as to leave her all but penniless. She smiled at Lord Peter with such an innocent display of pink lips and white teeth that he was certain any would-be procurer would engage her on the spot.

`I have been caring for my aunt who has recently died, don't you think, Miss Climpson, and I am anxious to see a little of the world? Other than elderly and disinterested uncles, I am naturally quite devoid of relatives.'

`Naturally,' agreed Lord Peter.

*

`White slavery, Peter? Honestly, even when I was still trying to get my first novel published and reduced to writing shockers for sensational magazines, I never sank to that!'

`Of course not. But then, my dear Harriet, you have artistic sensibilities. The newspaper - and the amateur criminal - mind does not.' He smiled at her. `Let's have some coffee and shelter from the storm, or must you get back to work?'

Harriet looked over her shoulder at the rain lashing against the window and shivered.

`I suppose I ought, but it's only proofs and I can do those tonight.' A particularly violent gust sent leaves spattering on the glass. `It's funny how bad weather makes lounging in front of a roaring fire toasting oneself feeling quite virtuous and justified.'

Lord Peter wrenched his fondly straying thoughts away from the gay gilded scenes and shining prospects of decidedly warm lounging before a hearth with Harriet, agreed that even in the Daimler the roads in their present state would be less than pleasant, and ordered two brandies. It had been Harriet who had raised the subject of Miss Climpson's present investigations, and he was still not entirely certainly whether it had been a valiant attempt to raise some sort of interest in what he had to confess had not hitherto been an entirely successful date, or a determination to test his friendship through refusing to allow the forgetting of its sordid beginnings. Given the skirt and coat in which she had appeared at her door earlier in the day, he was inclined to suspect the latter. That her mood seemed to have lifted despite initial intentions he was determined to take as a good sign. 

`I say, this coffee's quite decent.' Harriet grinned. `I can't say that Bohemia put much store by the culinary arts, but it did teach one about good coffee. `But you haven't finished telling me about the mysterious lady advertising for a companion - nor whether you really believe there are white slavers working out of Richmond sending young women into durance vile.'

`I rather doubt it. Even the wiser newspapers set their initial scenes in Berlin. Although, I did know a lady who,' he paused, a little embarrassed. `Well, that's by the by, as the captain said to the wicket-keeper.'

`You mean it's one of those stories,' Harriet said, suddenly scornful.

Wimsey looked up sharply. `What stories?'

`The ones that men tell. They come in two varieties. There's the good cheerful vulgar sort that they hint at but won't tell, because God forbid one might laugh, and there's the other sort that they insist on recounting in gory detail in order to provoke the desired reaction, according to which one is labelled a Jezebel or a prude. Which is yours?'

`Neither. Honestly, Harriet - I'd no intention - over-zealous in quite a different direction, I promise. I'd fall on my sword and be one of those people who are enormously improved by death, except that it'd upset my mother and make a dreadful mess of the carpet.'

`Oh.' Harriet twisted a hand embarrassedly, and took refuge in staring at the fireplace, as Wimsey, not for the first time, silently cursed poets, Bohemians in general, and Philip Boyes in particular.

`Though I don't know why I shouldn't tell you - you're hardly likely to meet her, given the conclusion. It's just about a girl I knew, who really did run off with a Sheikh - no, I swear I'm not making fun. They met in Paris. He was visiting an exhibition about modern irrigation plant.'

`And she?'

`I believe she was staying at the same hotel. In any case, the exhibition closed, he disappeared, and so did she. As she'd been living with someone at the time, there was naturally a certain concern as to whether she had been lured solely with the more innocuous perfumes of Arabia - especially as the Sheikh in question had been spotted chartering a private aeroplane. Terror of friends and relations with visions of E. M. Hull and so on. I was in Paris myself at the time and a, er, mutual friend asked me to investigate. To cut a long story short, I caught up with them in Qumran to find she had hied to the desert wild of her own free will and found it a paradise, and was writing a book on diseases of the camel. I hear that it has been translated into five languages.'

Harriet laughed. `Peter, I do believe you're having me on.'

`Cross my heart, and hope to die. In any case, I await Mrs Tainhurst's report with interest.'

*

Mrs Tainhurst, that convincing young woman, had indeed had no difficulty in securing the post of companion to Mrs Yorke, an elderly but far from decrepit widow who preferred to spend her winters on the Riviera. Having transported herself and her tennis rackets with an appropriate wardrobe to Nice, she duly sent reassuring daily telegrams to her employer in admirably terse phrases for three weeks until one arrived reading only MYSTERY UNVEILED, followed a few days later by, MYSTERY RESOLVED STOP DEPART RETURN TOMORROW. The following week, Lord Peter presented himself at the offices of the ostensible typing bureau that housed the Cattery, to do his duty to the returning soldier.

`Mrs Tainhurst has submitted an _admirable_ report, Lord Peter - I credit her nursing training, for instilling an understanding of which are the _important_ details - but I thought that you would like to see her in person, especially as I regret that she is to leave us, having by chance fallen in on the train with a friend of her brother and become engaged to marry him. I would say that it is a rather _short_ acquaintance on which to embark on such a _sacred commitment_ , but I understand that they used to play tennis together when he was up at Cambridge until the connection was cut short by his being obliged to see to property in the Argentine, and by the time he returned she was married. I shall be sorry to lose her, although it will be some months yet. Mrs Tainhurst informs me that she is quite prepared to become engaged on a short acquaintance, but that she would prefer to observe the beast in _closer quarters_ , if you will forgive the phrase - these young people have quite a turn with language - before entering the field.' 

Mrs Tainhurst was agreeably tanned, and in fine form.

`I was fairly sure at the start of it that Mrs Yorke wasn't involved in anything untoward. Of course, a lot of the people we come across are very convincing, Lord Peter, but it's in a different sort of way. However, the housekeeper was one of those grim-faced spectres that might hide all sorts of depravity in a flinty bosom, and as Mrs Yorke has a fairly extensive acquaintance in France, it might have been anyone of them. Besides, she could easily afford my fare, so it seemed no harm to go and see, and in any case she did need a companion and said that all the other girls had been hopeless.'

`Perhaps the better ones'd been warned off by the ever more frequent advert.'

`Yes,' mused Mrs Tainhurst, her bosom heaving under her silk blouse as Lord Peter observed privately that it was no wonder the brother's friend had remembered her. `My aunt had a friend who couldn't keep staff. People get to know about it and it puts them on their guard. Well, I accompanied Mrs Yorke down to Nice and she seemed perfectly agreeable. Her friends were perfectly respectable and established there. Not the sort that can just flit if it gets sticky, if you see what I mean. Or have flitted in from somewhere else. Even the housekeeper wasn't too bad, and you know what English servants can be like abroad. I was just beginning to think that it was all just a bit of bad luck, when Mrs Yorke's son arrived.'

`Ah!'

`Yes. I had an inkling as soon as I met him, and it barely took 48 hours to confirm it. He's a mathematician, Lord Peter, doing research at one of the London universities, and he stays with his mother in the vacations. Terribly clever, but hardly ever meets a woman, and then inclined to be awfully shy. You can guess the rest; he's been falling in love with the girls. Not in any sinister way, you understand, but as far as I can make out he was either mooning after them in a rather obvious fashion, or blurting out his deepest feelings within a week of acquaintance. Well, that sort of thing gets embarrassing and girls don't like it, and as it's the sort of place where there's quite a lot of posts about, they were inclined to take off. I met one of them at a party and she confirmed my suspicions.'

Lord Peter laughed. `Poor devil! I suppose that mathematicians are men as well as other folks, but sometimes one feels that certain members of our universities would have been better off in the days of monks. No doubt they still fell in love, but it happened less often, and with less inconvenience to all concerned. What did you do? You didn't just give notice and come back?'

`Oh no! I told Mrs Yorke about my engagement, and arranged a party. There's a nursing home a mile or so outside the town, so I invited all the nurses. I thought that Dr Yorke would prefer the caring type, and it all worked out quite nicely. His mother's over the moon - I suppose daughters-in-law can't give notice, and she was getting quite tired of interviews.'

Mrs Tainhurst was thanked and dismissed, and Lord Peter settled back in his chair.

`Any other business whilst I am here, Miss Climpson? Dubious pawnbrokers or suspicious chemists? I saw in this morning's _Wire_ that that unpleasant actor chap got several years. Allow me to congratulate you.'

`Thank you, Lord Peter. No, I believe that there are only the usual reports for you, and of course you will wish to read them at your leisure. Oh! But I was forgetting. I put this to go out with the post as usual, but perhaps you will wish to have it now. It will waste the stamp, I am afraid, but that cannot be helped. There is something almost _sacrilegious_ , do you not think, in the act of re-using even an unsent stamp.' She handed him a sturdy envelope, and he bid her good afternoon.

The day was fine and springlike, and his lordship walked back to the Piccadilly flat with the spring in his step, forgoing both cab and club, and ordered crumpets. These he ate thoughtfully looking over St James' Park, where the trees were, if not quite coming into leaf, inclining towards green at the bud. Peter washed his hands, slit the envelope carefully, and tipped the contents onto the gleaming tabletop. Three reviews of Harriet's latest novel, an article from a woman's magazine (with new photograph), and a short story in which Robert Templeton uncovered the murderer's fraudulent claim that the heiress had been kidnapped by white slavers: the weekly harvest from the clippings agency, sent to Miss Climpson's address and paid for from her expense account. There are some requests a man cannot make of his valet. The armchair wrapped itself affectionately about him as he settled back to read.

 _`White slavery!'_ said Templeton, _`Nonsense! Mark my words, this is quite another plot.'_

 


End file.
